Queen Victoria eBook

is now.” It is easy to imagine the agitating
effect of such a correspondence upon Beaconsfield.
This was no longer the Faery; it was a genie whom
he had rashly called out of her bottle, and who was
now intent upon showing her supernal power. More
than once, perplexed, dispirited, shattered by illness,
he had thoughts of withdrawing altogether from the
game. One thing alone, he told Lady Bradford,
with a wry smile, prevented him. “If I could
only,” he wrote, “face the scene which
would occur at headquarters if I resigned, I would
do so at once.”

He held on, however, to emerge victorious at last.
The Queen was pacified; Lord Derby was replaced by
Lord Salisbury; and at the Congress of Berlin der
alte Jude carried all before him. He returned
to England in triumph, and assured the delighted Victoria
that she would very soon be, if she was not already,
the “Dictatress of Europe.”

But soon there was an unexpected reverse. At
the General Election of 1880 the country, mistrustful
of the forward policy of the Conservatives, and carried
away by Mr. Gladstone’s oratory, returned the
Liberals to power. Victoria was horrified, but
within a year she was to be yet more nearly hit.
The grand romance had come to its conclusion.
Lord Beaconsfield, worn out with age and maladies,
but moving still, an assiduous mummy, from dinner-party
to dinner-party, suddenly moved no longer. When
she knew that the end was inevitable, she seemed, by
a pathetic instinct, to divest herself of her royalty,
and to shrink, with hushed gentleness, beside him,
a woman and nothing more. “I send some
Osborne primroses,” she wrote to him with touching
simplicity, “and I meant to pay you a little
visit this week, but I thought it better you should
be quite quiet and not speak. And I beg you will
be very good and obey the doctors.” She
would see him, she said, “when we, come back
from Osborne, which won’t be long.”
“Everyone is so distressed at your not being
well,” she added; and she was, “Ever yours
very aff’ly V.R.I.” When the royal
letter was given him, the strange old comedian, stretched
on his bed of death, poised it in his hand, appeared
to consider deeply, and then whispered to those about
him, “This ought to be read to me by a Privy
Councillor.”

CHAPTER IX. OLD AGE

I

Meanwhile in Victoria’s private life many changes
and developments had taken place. With the marriages
of her elder children her family circle widened; grandchildren
appeared; and a multitude of new domestic interests
sprang up. The death of King Leopold in 1865 had
removed the predominant figure of the older generation,
and the functions he had performed as the centre and
adviser of a large group of relatives in Germany and
in England devolved upon Victoria. These functions
she discharged with unremitting industry, carrying
on an enormous correspondence, and following with